My immigrant mother is a Korean herbalist and healer. She sang and talked to her plants, viewing them as living things that felt vibrations. She bestowed my body with the magical protection of her prayers and murmured blessings on me when I lay feverish in my bed as a child

On low-energy, high-burnout days, I’m still feeding the cycle of working too much, not really resting, and definitely not feeling restored. To pay down rest debt, I have to notice when I’m doing this and give myself permission to pull back.

Each interview is a gold mine, a feast of quotes to be hung up on walls, tattooed on arms, and copied in notebooks. A flurry of words to hold close on nights when being seen seems impossible and it feels as if no one else in the world knows who or what you are.

Every day that passes, I have come to know who I am a little bit more, and I like who I am. I have a life and a future out there in the free world, and resting for resistance keeps me sane so that I can avoid any issues that might keep me here any longer.

You refuse to engage with your abuser. Their presence reopens old wounds. You try to heal but it hurts. You like a worm on a bamboo stick hooked on the teeth of lies. Pain pushes you to find silence somewhere.

Celebrating our struggles and successes, and what we can learn from them, is far more meaningful than a mere style parade that glamorizes binary identities, heteronormative rights, and impossible-to-maintain beauty standards.

Not only are mental health and racism deeply intertwined, but that connection is too often overlooked or denied. Intersectional mental health isn’t neat and tidy, with one problem over here and the other over there, and the messiness is what we need support to work through

When abusers deny us our reality, it’s gaslighting. When we enact that denial on ourselves, it’s equal parts survival skill and self-harm. Yet we have the ability to change how we treat ourselves, even if we can't change how others treat us.

Thoughts of suicide come when we run out of options. The more we’re oppressed, the less power we have, which means thoughts of ending our lives might come up a lot. Here are resources and strategies to help you keep fighting for your life without compromising your agency.

The health of our societies depends on the community's ability to hold its members accountable in a way that makes space for each other's individual, predisposed fallibility and capacity for personal growth.

When we heal, we are able to be more to each other and ourselves. And not in that way where it eventually makes us good productive workers. We become more invested in ourselves, and we have more of ourselves to utilize in the ways that bring joy for everyone, including us.

I wish I had told my friend to seek out generosity, forgiveness, and understanding in unlikely places. To find people who made him feel safe. To find spaces that loved him as hard as he loved the Movement.

Becoming sober has allowed me to discover who I really am and has allowed me to fall in love with myself. I still battle with thoughts of drinking because I live at home with my dad, but I know that putting my life in jeopardy and hurting my loved ones is not a risk I'm willing to take.